Using reports to better your business

Andrew Myers

August 07, 2015 04:18

Reporting is key to analysing the way your business functions and what areas of your business need improvement. Briefcase makes it easy to analyse this and we've setup a multitude of reports that can assist you. Below is a list of our standard reports and how to best use them. Don't forget that we can also do custom reports for you to ensure that Briefcase does what you need it to do.

Contacts

Contact Correspondence

This report contains contact notes and phone numbers. You can run this report to see all follow up notes and correspondence across your company for any set time period or even by department to quickly gauge who needs to follow up with clients.

Client Sales Summary

This report lists clients alphabetically to show you who is bringing you in the most sales. You can customise the criteria for this report to show specific date ranges, departments, and even clients by an account manager.

Supplier Orders Summary

This report details the orders by supplier with the percentage of total. This is a handy report to run so you can understand which suppliers are getting used the most and is a handy report to run towards the end of Financial Year.

Jobs

Job Accruals

This report demonstrates a summary of estimates, actuals and invoice amounts. It can demonstrate at a glance the actual time that has gone into a job compared to what was estimated and what was invoiced. You can set the criteria to a specific company to that you can show where you may be needing to invoice more in future, you can set the criteria to Account manager so they can better understand where they may be under or overquoting clients and many more....

Job Summary

The Job Summary report can assist with showing account managers a listing of jobs with the Estimate, Actual and Invoice times. It can be used to help guide team members as to the status of remaining time and additional costs.

Job Status Summary

This report summarises all jobs by status so you can see at a glance who the manager, next action and accounting information. It's a great report to quickly see what stage your jobs are at and what is left to invoice.

Job Duration by Manager

This chart shows the average length of jobs by account manager. This can help pinpoint any potential issues that my influence the length of a job.

Job Summary by Rate

This report lists the Estimated, Actual & Invoiced costs per your rates matrix. This is a great way to ensure your rates matrix is as accurate to the end cost as possible.

Estimates

Estimate Forecast

This report summarises potential sales grouped by the month in which it's expected to be finalised. It omits estimates which have been cancelled or declined so it is quite an important report to help forecast the future of business.

Estimating Value

This chart demonstrated where your business value for a particular period you can set will be. It lets you see at a glance where your values are by status.

Estimating Performance

This chart measures the performance of estimate authors (Account Managers) to show the amount of estimates created seperated by the status attribute.

Approved Estimate by Item

This report lists approved estimates based on estimate line item. A great example of this is the ability to see what amounts of Account Service have been approved.

Purchases

Supplier Purchases Summary

This report summarises orders by department and supplier. It indicates the total job cost in comparison to the percentage of the cost attributed by the Purchase Order.

Supplier Orders Summary

This report summaries the orders by supplier by cost to the business and the percentage attributed by the supplier. This report can help differentiate preference to supplier and distribute your external costs evenly to different suppliers.

Purchase Item by Supplier

This report lists the purchase items by supplier with total percentages for each item. This report can indicate where costs may be higher with particular suppliers and can also be handy to run for accountants to see account codes specific to supplier.

Purchase Item by Category

This report lists purchase items by Category with indications as to the total percentage that applied to the overall supplier costs. Popular criteria searches for this item are managing supplier costs by Company or Department.

Invoices

Department Sales Summary

This report summarises invoices by department and client. It also includes the total percentage of sales that each client contributes. Popular search criteria for running this report is sorting the data by Department and Status.

Client Sales Summary

This report lists clients by department and both the sales and percentage of sales the client contributes. Setting this report to large date ranges can assist in representing who are your biggest sales contributers.

Annual Sales

Similar to the report above, the Annual Sales report lists each month for the past 12 months and shows sales within each month by client. Popular search criteria for this report is running the report for a specific department and Name (Account Manager).

Annual Sales Chart

This bar chart illustrates your monthly sales figures over 12 months. This report can help space work out so that your monthly income is less variable.

Invoice Item by Category

This report lists invoice items by Category with indications as to the total percentage that applied to the overall sales costs. A popular use of this report is to run it by Account Manager to easily gauge what percentage of costs are going into each category.

Time and Expenses

Weekly Time Summary

This report totals day-to-day time entries for team members grouped by week. It highlights under utilized days and also displays the average amount of time entry per day. This can be a useful report to ensure team members keep up their time entry.

Time & Expense by Name

The summarised report groups the time and expense entries per user. It also includes material costs if applicable. Popular search criteria for this report is running the report for a speific job or specific company.

Time Summary by Client

This report demonstrates the time summary data for clients under the Department Grouping. It also shows Hours entered and allows you to compare this against billable time, non billable time and the sale price. This can help you make better informed decisions regarding costs for your services.

Expense Summary by Client

This report offers summarised grouping of expenses by client with both the cost and billable amount. Popular search criteria for this report is to order it by status to give you an insight into how many expenses may be outstanding.

Time Detail by Job Status

This report allows you to see at a glance time entry details grouped by job status. It also includes the hours entered (including seperate columns for billable and non billable time) and includes the sale amount.

Expense Detail by Job Status

Similar to the above report, this report lets you see the expense entries grouped by job status. It also provides information regarding the quantity and descriptions of expenses to help you analyse where potential costs may need to be involved in future.

Virtual Billing

This summarised report demonstrates all time and expenses entered into a job. It can be used to show the commercial value of their work.

Time Utilization

This report is generated based on the information for each team members user profile. Their work hours are calculated and used to form a utilization graph. This report covers the overall amount of work hours for the search criteria and compares it to the hours the team member has entered. This allows you to run reporting that shows what percentage of work hours the team member has utilised.

Time Chart by Item

This chart represents the time summaries by time type.

Time Chart by Name

This pie chart report shows time entry percentage for all team members.

Billable Time

This chart displays the billable and non billable time for each team member. Popular search criteria for running this report is setting a specific job number or client.